Imam Mustafa Efe Welcomes Homeless Cats Into His Istanbul Mosque To Save Them From The Winter Cold

The Aziz Mahmud Hüdayi Mosque is getting a huge thumbs up all across the world, because its imam is letting homeless cats into the mosque so they don't have to suffer out in the cold. Mustafa Efe is currently the imam (the one who leads the prayers) at this Istanbul mosque, and he decided that no cat should have to endure a winter in Turkey without shelter.I don't know about you, but when I spend too much time reading stuff online, I end up getting depressed. It feels like all we ever hear about is bad news. But reading about a mosque helping poor little kitties? Well, that just made me feel all warm inside. You've got to check out the video Laughing Squid shared; it'll brighten your day. The Dodo explained that one mother cat brought each of her kittens into the mosque, one by one, after finding the accommodations rather cozy — and there they've stayed ever since.

Efe has quite the following, as demonstrated by his 30,000+ Facebook followers. Even his Twitter page gets a lot of action. Unfortunaetly I don't speak the language, so I can't understand a lick of what he's saying; even so, though, I can certainly appreciate his do-gooding. We could use more people life Efe, doing kind deeds out of the goodness of his heart and spreading a message of love and generosity.

Turkey has a documented problem of free-roaming cats and dogs. It's estimated that in Istanbul alone, there are at least 150,000 stray dogs roaming around. Unlike America, Turkey is very against the process of euthanizing cats and dogs to maintain population control. They instead prefer to take in stray animals, spay/neuter them, vaccinate and treat them for any illnesses, and then release them back into the neighborhood they were found in, tagged for identification. It is their hope that this will reduce the number of strays (since they won't be reproducing) and will also make them less of a threat to public health, because rabies has been a common find in their stray dogs.